Dung Beetles

Dung Beetles

Dung Beetles
Reading Level

	edHelper's suggested reading level:	grades 3 to 6
	Flesch-Kincaid grade level:	8.33

Vocabulary

challenging words:

beetles, benefits, droppings, dwellers, hence, larva, lays, species, manure, directly, mainly, packing, underground, deposit, thus, kingdom

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Other Languages
Spanish: Escarabajo del Estiércol

Dung Beetles

¹ In the animal kingdom, there is one animal that takes the saying "One person's junk is another person's treasure" to the extreme. That animal is the dung beetle.

² As their name suggests, dung beetles love manure, the smelliest and the dirtiest junk that any animal can produce! "Yuck!" maybe the reaction that most of us have upon learning dung beetles' peculiar taste. Yet, this specific habit of dung beetles is so pivotal that Earth would look completely different without them. Here are the benefits that dung beetles bring to our planet, to name just a few:

By cleaning up manure from the surface, dung beetles make Earth a livable place.
By removing animal waste from the ground, dung beetles keep the population of pests that breed inside animals' droppings (such as flies) in check.
By burying animal feces underground, dung beetles fertilize soil and increase pasture yields.

³ With over 7,000 species on all continents except Antarctica, dung beetles can be divided into three groups -- rollers, tunnellers, and dwellers. Both rollers and tunnellers are famous for making "brood balls" out of dung. What separates rollers from tunnellers is where they live. Rollers build underground homes (or burrows) away from dung. Hence, after packing animal waste into a ball, they must roll it home. Tunnellers, on the contrary, construct their burrows either directly beneath or near the edge of dung, so they don't have to travel for a distance to put away their brood balls.

Paragraphs 4 to 6:
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